How the Next Civil War May Take Shape; A Reprise of the 60s?

In the 1960s, 1) with an anti-war movement scripted, and even controlled more than we knew, straight from Moscow, 2) a civil rights movement that would be ensnared and redirected as soon as Dr Martin Luther King and his closest followers could be despatched (1968), and 3) the rise of a cradle-to-grave incubation system where bright, affluent middle-class kids with only one defining characteristic, that they were coddled and spoiled, irrespective of race, could be indoctrinated in the genteel art of social “alienism” (as writers at National Review called it then – not to be confused with the new mini-series based on the 1994 novel by Caleb Carr, a very good book in its own right, in which psychologists were considered “alienists”) the structural design of the dismantling of the Republic was being fashioned.

In the 60s, that indoctrination began in college, today, kids are tapped out as early at 4th Grade. My first memory of “alienists” in the NR sense was in mentioning the “anti-” nature of people such as Hillary Rodham while with the Watergate impeachment hearings committee and Nadar’s Raiders and their signature proclivity for storming government hearings and generally turning over tables in the Peoples’ office buildings. Too green to dislike bureaucracies at the time, that was an activity I had some empathy for, but it was National Review who drew the distinction for me between “anti-bureaucracy” and “anti-social” – which has served me ever since.

Although he was not popularly known then, the fingerprints of Saul Alinksy were all over the activities of these early radical prototypes, and they were soon to be morphed into armies of lawyers with briefcases, headed by the environmental movement, of which I was a member, “Sue the bastards” our rallying cry.

That period of the 1960s saw the rise of black separatist movements, e.g. Black Panthers, all claiming a kinship with Dr King I doubt he ever intended, and of course race riots broke out in several cities. They were not spontaneous as the public was led to believe. Likewise the evolution of the Black Muslim movement and Nation of Islam occurred in this period, popularized by Muhammad Ali, the great boxer, who always invoked Elijah Muhammad when he proclaimed his faith, only to leave the Farrakhan wing in favor of a more peaceful form of Islam as originally set out by Malcomb X, before he was assassinated.

In short, the “civil war” of the 1960s was represented by a “counterculture” that had great selling power in Hollywood, television and music industries, but less in the public at large. From 1964 on, but particularly after the 1968 election, it was made clear that the American voters, and leaderships of both parties, who still “loved America” despite all the positive press the counterculture was getting, and were not about to accede to college students and their faculties’ demands to end the war in Vietnam according to their strictures. Almost a decade of protests took place where universities were taken over, beginning with CAL-Berkeley and ending with some very sad deaths at Kent State in 1970.

Although the FBI knew most of these connections it was not popularly reported that all these events, riots, street protest, college take-overs, even the occasional bombing and bank robbery, had links; that Marxist campus protest leaders were also attending, then leading seminars, in the Deep South trying to radicalize young blacks fighting local Jim Crow laws. For instance, Mario Savo, a ringleader of the original Berkeley campus takeover, ostensibly as part of a “Freedom of Speech” movement, had gotten his spurs radicalizing blacks in Alabama.

People didn’t so easily make those connections then, in part because they believed that most Americans, and certainly in government and the Congress, were on the same page about certain fundamental things about America. We talk those all the time here. Tweren’t so even then, but with the development of the Occupy Movement in 2011, those with memories spotted a repeat of the early 1960s, where a few common threads connected virtually every new campus initiative, threat and gripe; white supremacy, safe-space, anti-free speech, black separatism, even ANTIFA. All bear the unmistakable fingerprints of the original Occupy Agitprop graduates from 2011, and their tutors/handlers.

The 60s was a de facto mini-civil war, to the extent all of these elements were tied together by a low-tech communications system bested probably by only the Algerian terrorists in the 1950s, against the French. They were always one step ahead of the other most-hated FBI director, J Edgar Hoover, who became the national poster boy for “government snooping and invasions of privacy” – which only applied when Republicans were in power. (No sense to repeat how well the Clintons and Obama used those powers in later administrations.) What Hoover was trying to connect was the legitimate dots between Moscow and the various universities and hundreds of private NGOs who carried interesting names like Albanian Mothers and Children Relief Organization, back in a time when Communist Front organizations were illegal and the Attorney General had to post a list (regularly revised) for which aspiring government employees and persons seeking security clearances, had to affirm they had never been members. I did.

And the FBI did surveillance and data gathering the old fashioned way, with binoculars, stake-outs, wire-taps, almost all of them with warrants, and they kept all their field notes in regular ring-binders and plain paper, called “dossiers.” This was all considered highly immoral and fought vigorously in the streets, the courts and in the media from the mid-1960s on.

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